The game is about encouraging creatures to evolve and mate to strengthen their species in the face of an incoming invasion.

UNITY WEBPLAYER: works only on systems that support the Unity Webplayer plugin.

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I have had the chance now to fix a few of the bugs - the endgame problem is fixed, and distances are now all calculated based on the zx plane for things like beaming up creatures and finding mates. The deathray now fires properly and I increased the speed of males when chasing mates - and fixed a bug which meant the creatures weren't getting faster as they evolved.

Well, for a short and sweet game, this is pretty fun. I enjoyed it for a few minutes but it did kind of get a little boring after a while. For what it is, though, nice job. :)
I would like to see an enhanced/expanded version if you want to sort of complete it for post-LD play!

Thanks for the comments guys. There's another pretty major bug where half of the time the "endgame" invasion doesn't seem to work - either the bad guys don't manage to reach the creatures or the death ray doesn't work. Sometimes it works perfectly though, I think it's related to the steepness of the terrain the creatures are on - when the terrain is flatter the game works better overall. If the monolith spawns on the side of a steep hill it's better to just restart the game (F5)

- Death ray doesn't work in the endgame (as you stated above)
- The introduction textes are skipped too fast... you should make the player skip them instead
- My ship can fly under water ^^
- What do the symbols near the creatures mean? The number is the level, but what are the others for?
- I had a big black rectangle somewhere in the landscape

I wonder if there's a better way to teach the player how to play. The on screen instructions are better than off, but there's still a lot of reading to do, especially when I'm supposed to do it as I play in a font that is a little tough to read quickly.

I found this game a little confusing so spent most of my time just randomly clicking to see if anything happened then I went for a fly around the island instead :) But it has a lot of potential so keep up the good work.

Yes the help texts are too wordy - context sensitive cues would have been better but the way it works was just quicker and easier to get into the game in time. Also should have made them queue up and not disappear until the player presses something. All good feedback, thanks!

David, the basic instructions are at the top of this page, also if you get lost on the map there should be little floating icons around your ship showing you the direction of the monolith/creatures/etc. The idea is simply to pick them up and put the blue ones down near the pink ones to encourage them to breed. When you pick them up they evolve, but only once per creature. Their offspring can then reach a higher evolution level than they did (if you're lucky), be evolved and breed with another of the same or higher evolution level to create even more evolved offspring and so on until they're as evolved as possible in the 3 minute or so time limit.

Hehe, the original idea was that once they grow the arms at the last evolution stage, they would have claws and be able to fight back against the invaders, who originally looked like the creatures but were black and red. I decided there wouldn't be time to do the fighting mechanics so changed the ending... unfortunately what I changed it to turned out to be more complicated and rushing it caused the bug that stops it working half the time :(

Goffmog: Thanks for the explanation. Sorry, I didn't want to mean the game was not well explained. After playing again I realized I got lost because I couldn't clearly see what creature has already paired and which didn't. Not your game's fault but mine. Anyway, that didn't influence my rating :)

Really cool idea and I had some fun but I had a hell of a time controlling the ship. It seemed like you somehow programmed the game to pick up every creature BUT the one I was aiming for. I really couldn't figure out why. With a time limit, that frustration killed the fun for me.

Sorry my comment was not v. constructive - I really liked the landscape and the idea was cool, one thing that popped to mind was that if you pick up someone it mutates them, and only if you pick them up do you see the "status: mutated" text, so does the text really ever change? kind of a Schrodinger's cat situation. I would love to play this again when it's fixed!

Jedi, sounds like you had some hilly terrain :) The problem is that, just to get it ticked off of my to-do list, the algorithm finds the nearest creature to the player does so by distance in 3D, when it really should be doing it by distance in the xz plane. So when you're floating over a creature at the bottom of a steep hill, and there's another one half way up the hill, the one you beam up will be the one on the hill because technically, he's closer to your position in mid-air.... doh!

BrothersT, lol, there's the connection to kittens for you. My original design had primordial ooze instead of water and you had to beam up ooze and drop it on the creatures to evolve them - but I culled that to save some time.

At first I taught there were two species pinks and blues. So tried to encourage the blues to mate with the blues and pinks with pinks. My early experiments were unsuccessful. I wonder if this is how real alien abductions work out.

OK, I liked it, but...
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/839/unnaturalselection.png/
now what? where is your god now? XD
The things I appreciate too much is the circle around de UFO which you control and the smooth movement, do you know you can cast a ray from the base of the ship to the ground and sum the y (axis value) of the ground to the y of the ship a constant distance ,so you have a ship flying over the mountains up and down ,it's a cool effect :)
I am very confused with the gameplay, sounds and some guide should be very good help...

juaxix I'm struggling to get what you mean by the circle around the UFO. The ship does follow the terrain height in a similar way to which you describe, except instead of raycasting it gets the optimum height directly from the height data the map is generated from - the UFO floats gradually down/up to the desired height - and that was the effect I was going for. Following the terrain at a constant height seemed less fun to me - although that's exactly how the bad guys move.... Re. the screenshot... Well, you're prety much screwed at that point :) Did you read any of the helptext? That was meant to act as a guide.

Hamster - given more time I'd probably have more of a context sensitive help system that would point out what each thing is the first time you encounter it.... This is one of those games that seemed like a very simple idea at first and only later did I realise the number of points at which it isn't totally obvious what you should be doing - especially if you don't read the helptext.

Josh, sorry it doesn't work for you :( Are you using WINE on a Mac? I think the web version should work natively in Chrome or Firefox on Mac with the Unity plugin. I keep meaning to do a windows build but right now I'm travelling and don't really have the resources but I'll see if I can get one uploaded on Wednesday.

Nice, but in general you could slow down the tutorial a bit. I read the text, but I wasnt thinking about it and I started again and missed it. And even in second try i didnt know what to do. But i like the concept.

Yanmania, godaddy are an enormously massive domain registration thingy, my domain is registered with them. I guess you were served a domain parking page. I haven't been having any issues though, have you tried again?

Thanks Ollie, your game was really good! One of these days I'll make something that's a simpler concept that I can polish a bit more. did you check out the bugfixed version? endgame should be ok in that (it hasn't crashed for me yet)

I don't know what to do in this game. Things are in the ground and was hard to figure this out. It's also hard to know if the icon is showing the creature or just the direction to it. The beam isn't getting the right ones and I don't know if the bullets are going the direction they are because they are tracking an enemy or not. Why the UFO goes under the see or sliding up the hill instead of hovering above?

It's interesting that people think the way the saucer moves is a bug :) I spent quite a while making sure it didn't just follow the terrain at the same height, and did something more interesting. The saucer has a preferred height that it adjusts itself to, but it doesn't do so instantly because I wanted to create a specific effect reminiscent of playing old helicopter flight sims with auto ground avoidance.

RawBits, the deathray is still buggy even in the bugfixed version, it has to do with how I'm rotating the camera, the angle I think the player is facing starts off correct but drifts as the player does a lot of rotation. Beaming up creatures should be fine now though, I assume you're using the original buggy version in which case the reason you don't beam up the right creature is that it's taking vertical distance into account when finding the nearest creature.